Excerpt: Tears in the Reader

Chapter 1

I knew myself to be insane. That was the first thought I had when I woke up this morning. I grabbed my laptop from my bedpost and turned it on, writing those words down frantically so I could remember them later when I wrote my sixth novel. I had no idea what the plot would be, but Susan, my agent, was due to call, publishing companies were hissing on my neck hairs, and I had a list of phrases that had recently come to my head as long as my pen. I mean, that is, that's all my pen had been doing for the past month while I assured Susan that my next bestseller would be on the shelves in a matter of months.

I looked at the bright screen as my eyes got used to their state of awakeness. Alison... Alison... Oh. That was the name of my female lead. Bleary-eyed I typed the words “she's crazy, but doesn't realize it.” Not any kind of scizophrenic revelation story, that's been done before. A more kind of insidious insanity. Insidious insanity. I liked it. I typed that too. Alliterative.

I went through the morning routine. Grabbed my coffee that was brewing from a time-delay system, made myself some poptarts and sat down at the laptop. I cracked my knuckles, and adjusted my bathrobe, because that's what I always did before sitting down to a morning of writing. It made me feel ready.

I watched the blinking line that glared back at me from the blank Word document. Possibilities. Endless possibilities meant that I couldn't choose any. So I sat. And I stared. I wrote Alison and I stared some more. I needed a good first line. A “best of times worst of times” deal. Something that would blow all my other first lines out of the water. It was hanging there in my mind, in the space between Alison and the little demonic blinking line that marked my place on the page.

“D*****,” I said aloud. “I don't even have a title.” A car honked outside. I could hear the bass from several streets away rattling the windows of the town house like when the neighbors next door had loud obnoxious intimacy. I got up and paced, I was too distracted, too sleepy. The coffee hadn't started working yet. Then, like a dictionary falling off my head, I felt the weight of those first lines slide off my mind. I sat down, I had them.

Alison was insane, but...A screeching noise tore through my mind like a buzzsaw.

What the f*** was that noise? The phone was ringing. I still had the thought lingering like a kiss from my ex. It'd stay then, if the metaphor was accurate. I picked up the phone.

“What is it? What do you want?”

“Tom?” It was my agent, Susan. “Sorry, did I wake you up? It's twelve. I thought for sure you'd be up by now.”

I looked back at the laptop longingly. The words were sucked into a vaccum, dried up, their power went limp.

“Just checking on my star author,” she said flirtatiously. It wasn't flirting in serious, I knew, but she did always lighten my mood with her compliments.

“Yeah, I'm just fine. I was writing.”

“On the novel for me, right?” Of course on the novel for you, like I have any other projects that I can devote my time to. “When do I get to read it? I love being the first.”

She would be the first. If I ever thought of the damned first words. Or the title. “In a few months.” Ever since the second book, I hardly had time to do second and third drafts. It was okay though, I wrote pretty well the first time around. So a few months was probably accurate.

“What's it about?” she was always prying into it. She probably was intelligent enough to gather that I wasn't really writing yet. She'd been in the business a while before me.

“Oh you know, same as my last books,” I started lamely. I had to give her something though to assuage her doubts so she'd leave me alone to write. “It's kind of a psychological thriller about this girl named Alison...”

Alison. Alison was insane, but... another obnoxious intrusion.

“What happens to her?” Asked Susan.

“Well she's a stripper.”

“A stripper?” she asked. “That's new. Been visiting the underworld gathering research?” her coy mannerism made me forget my annoyance that she had yet again made me forget the opening line.

“You know me, I practically live on forty-second street,” I responded. Actually I'd never been to second avenue, where all that stuff was. It made me nervous when I passed it, walking home. I never drove, walking gave me time to think. Time to think. Alison...

Alison was insane, but it wasn't...oh, you're having a conversation, Tom.

“I know you, Tom, and I'm pretty sure you'd take a hooker for coffee first.” She laughed affectionately, and it was infectious, so I chuckled as well. She knew me for certain. “So what happens to this stripper? I bet you've got the whole plot in those volumes of snippets of yours.” If only I could always decipher what I'd written, she was probably right. Though how all those little fragments went together was something I'd probably not figure out until the damned thing was finished. And even then I'd look at that file and wonder what was going on in my head when I wrote it.

“Yeah,” I said, thinking quickly to come up with some kind of plot, inciting device and characteristic dark melodrama, “one of the men at the bar she works at takes a liking to her body, right?” Already the lie was starting to ferment and turn into a fine wine. It might work. Alison the stripper.

Alison was insane, but it wasn't the kind of insanity she could see... so close.

“Just as dark as your last one, I see,” said Susan, with a hint of disapproval. Though it was only disapproval in jest. She'd chosen my book several years ago because she liked the subtext of sinful dark meandering. Apparently other people did too, because she's made some money out of my books. New York Times bestseller list for the last two. I was particularly proud of that, and it was partially why I was having so much trouble with that first line. People were watching.

“Don't tell me you have a problem with that?” I said, chuckling again.

“Of course not. You just keep doing what you're doing. I love it.”

“Because you get rich off of it?” I asked, smiling. Though I knew she couldn't see my smile. She could hear my smile through the phone.

“Of course. So tell me more, you've got me interested now. There's a creepy stalker at the stripper bar?”

I invented some plot devices quickly. There wasn't much to creating plot on the fly. Maybe it was just a gift of mine, I could spin a story out of nothing in no time. “Right, she gets attacked by him and her world turns into hell, and she can't figure out which way is up.”

“Like Psyche's Secrets?”

She was right, I'd used that plot point before. Damn. I had to put a new spin on it. “You know how much I hate you comparing new stories to my old ones.” Psyche's Secrets had the girl Psyche attacked in a subway station and she spiraled into insanity and finally realized that it had all been false with the help of her boyfriend. The true rapist turned out to be that very boyfriend.

“I'm sorry, Tom. Go on.”

She must think I'm one of those authors who gets snooty about their work. I guess I presented myself that way to her just now. “Well sort of like that,” I said, hoping it would be enough to let her know that I wasn't a typical holy author. Not that she didn't know. “Only the attack is real obviously.” I said hastily. That wouldn't cinch the difference, but it would buy me time. “She thinks she got away, but through her psychological torture she discovers that it actually had happened as she worried.” Ah, the plot was completed. Scenes started filling themselves in, getting color and tint. I watched as my story was infused with life.

“Dark, brooding, and with Sentir's natural charm.” She was referring to my pen name of course. “I can see the press quips already. Though an uncharacteristic ending, Tom. I'm worried it might be a little unsatisfying.” She was worrying that readers wouldn't stick with me if it turned out that the main character was ultimately doomed.

“No,” I said, revising my ending as fast as my mind would allow. “She discovers that her life of being a stripper is what brought the evil on her, so she starts a new life vowing to forget the...” I paused for the right word to come. “Atrocity.” That was the story. Intrigue, darkness, and character redemption. That was what life was all about. I smiled and waited for Susan's praise.

“Sounds like a real nail-biter.” The book was sold. “I can't wait to give it a look. How far are you?” There was the answer I couldn't bullshit my way through. I had to straight out lie and make up for it with a few days of frantic typing. Of course, I could always say in the end that I needed time to revise.

“Oh, about a quarter.”

“Sounds good. Could you send me a proof of the first chapter? For a press release.” The subtext was that she had seen right through my lie. If she had really bought it she would have complimented me and hung up.

“Sure,” I said. “I'm busy though, I'll e-mail it to you tomorrow.” I held back a sigh. More things to do. I still had to go see Barry today at some point. That left me little time to get the first chapter pounded out.

“Alright Tom. Stay in the dark.” She flippantly quoted my tag line. It was how I signed my books. I liked that phrase, it captured the negative revelations that my books centered on. I gave her a courtesy laugh.

“Right, you too.” I hung up. I sat the phone on the receiver and held my head in my hand, perplexed about the first line. I'd thought of something before.

Alison was insane, but it wasn't the kind of insanity that a man could see.

That was it. My first line. I wrote it with excitement and hit the period key like a quill in an inkwell. It got everything I wanted, a hint of impending doom, insidious – but not obvious – insanity, a macabre yet witty tip-of-the-hat to the plot to come, and an idea of the inner more delicate driving concept.

That was an opening sentence.

An excerpt from the Author's Note of Psyche's Secrets by Jack Sentir, reprinted here with permission from the author:

“Author's Note

When I first heard that Psyche's Secrets was going into a second edition, I was elated. I had thought at the time that, while my other books had gotten some relative success, that the world didn't want to be let in on secrets of this kind. I had assumed, and not unreasonably, that things dark and forbidden were by most considered so deeply taboo and depressing that they were best shoved in a closet and forgotten. But the success of Psyche's uncompromising story of grim storms and insanity proves the willingness of readers to look at the darker questions.

Why? Is it, as my critics have mentioned, an intense desire to look at brutality because we are bloodthirsty creatures? I think not. The story of Psyche is not a mere 90's hack and slash ripoff, at least I hope – it was my intention rather to write something more than an insipid romance novel for horror. It was this project that I worried would be lost in the chaos of the story, that people would look away assuming it to be another book in the cannon of those books too grimy and depressing to read.

But that project, my hope, was that the reader would see through the text into the inner workings of my mind, where they might see the beacon from the lighthouse of the story. This light in the darkness is Psyche's mental rebirth and discovery, her recognition of truth in the dark of terror. And though she loses something she thought was important, she gains a true understanding of the world. You, reader, have proven to me that you were able to see me behind the text, and I was able to give you some light. You, in spite of Psyche's depression, have seen the story through to the end. If you haven't yet read the book, then you have no doubt heard the criticisms and the mutterings but bought it anyway.

I was once approached by a wrathful mother on my book. She had apparently caught her daughter reading it, and threw it right into the trashcan. She asked me how I could write such tasteless smut? How could I throw such filthy dirt onto the flames of purity? I wonder, in retrospect, whether or not she was mad at me. Wasn't it the story she was mad about? And what was a story? How could what I write, a mere intellectual exercise, possibly harm anyone? If this is so, then it must be that she was mad at herself, unable to contradict the frightening thought that something in her life might be a lie. She was not worried that the story was false foolishness, but rather that it was true, and her “pure flame” which was having dirt thrown on was not so pure to begin with...

...I should conclude with an entreaty to you, reader. Consider, as you read, that this book is my child, my progeny. I love it as I love no other, and if it is ugly and deformed, I do not see its deformity. I see rather a beautiful diamond that came from my head, and I do not hear its critics, I am deaf when they speak. Consider then that if you chuckle, I was laughing. If you are frightened, I was cowering. If you are angry, I was stomping my laptop into pieces. If you cry, I was weeping. If there are no tears in the author, there are no tears in the reader. I tried my best to let you into my heart, so that together we could gain something. I hope I have succeeded.

Stay in the Dark

-Jack Sentir”